Notices

I know $20 isn't much, but it's what I can afford right now. It would buy a nice six pack of beer, or a mediocre bottle of wine though.

Einstein is already a .deb in the Ubuntu repos, and is GPL licensed.
The website is herehttp://games.flowix.com/en/index.html.

This may help: The game does not run without modification on my eee 701 which has the same resolution as the n810, because it's too big for the screen. By default the game tries to open in full screen. when I try to open it via the icon, nothing happens. I have not tried to open it via the command line, so I do not know if it reports any errors. I saw on some forum that a config file can be edited to cause it to open in windowed mode, but I can not find that thread again. I was able to get it to open by booting into that Ubuntu install on another computer starting the program and debigulating it before closing it and shutting down. Now it runs fine on the eee, but it's bigger than the screen, and you have to pan around to see everything. It would be much better on the eee, (and presumably the N***) with a smaller playing field/tile set.

I will happily provide a modified tile set to anyone interested in the project if you can tell me how big to make them. I think 30X30 pixels would be ok, but I don't know for sure. Also the tile set it comes with is a bit confusing, and would be worse on a tiny screen. I do have some ideas to make it more usable on a small screen.

As far as the bounty goes, I will paypal or mail a check to the person who gets the .deb into a repo.

Hi Pokey,
I took a shot at it tonight/this morning, and I have an initial port for you to test out. It has a few issues, some likely related to not being Hildon-friendly (read: if you switch to another window, it bombs), but it has been adapted to the 800x480 pixel screen, and it runs quite well, with sound and all. I was too tired to actually *play* the game, so I haven't been able to verify that the high score entry dialog is tweaked properly, but it should be. The original author unfortunately only provided graphics in Windows BMP format, so for the menu screen, I had to create my own, since it wouldn't resize nicely. If you don't like it, I can change it.
The current DEB (and any update versions, for now) can be found here.
Please test it out, and let me know if it is to your satisfaction. I was unclear from your post whether simply adapting the graphics would meet your bounty requirements, or if you wanted a full port first. I fully intend to finish the port regardless of if or when I receive the money, anyway. PM me if you need to.

In regards to your comments about the tileset, it would be no problem to swap that out, although it looks fine to me on the N810's screen. If you want me to build it with a different set, simply download this file for reference, and replace each of the "large-xx.bmp" and "small-xx.bmp" files with your own images (with the same filenames). Large tiles should be 36px, and small should be 12px. Tar/Zip them up, and post them somewhere, and I'll rebuild it for you with those graphics.

EDIT: also include the tile.bmp, hint-tile.bmp, hint-near.bmp, and hint-side.bmp files at the minimum. On second thought, wait until I post my modified resource tarball tomorrow, and then things will be simpler.

Cheers,

Update: Okay, it now shows up the task switcher, and doesn't crash. Yay. I still need to make it show the application name in the task switcher, but that will have to wait until later today, probably. Other than that, things work fine, although I may decide to tweak the menu screen a bit at some point.

http://wiki.maemo.org/Game_development

Thanks, mikkov! That helped a bunch. Last night when I was working on this, I was too tired to actually play the game, so I missed a rather important thing - right-clicking is needed for gameplay to function. >_< Support for that is in the works; my current idea is to use the hardware fullscreen button as a modifier. (This does assume a right-handed player, but I can't think of any better ideas at the moment. If anyone else can, please let me know.) After that's done, I'll test everything out, but I think that should be all that's needed.

jaem, the port looks great, and the menu screen is particularly beautiful. I'm sorry that i forgot about the need for a right click, or I would have mentioned it. I like the idea of a modifier button. The space bar could work for both left and right handed players on the 810, but it would exclude 770 & 800 users. Perhaps it could be user selectable, or there could be more than one? Could it be on screen and toggle from select to eliminate?

Since you said you are going to impliment a solution, I'm perfectly willing to take you at your word, and pay you now. Just let me know how to get the money to you.

I do need to report a bug though. Sadly, (for me) it is of the pebkac variety. I unchecked the "full screen" tickbox, and crashed the program. Now it starts unmaximized, but is still at 840x400, so it is largely off the screen. attempts to maximize it only crash it, and it is unfortunately persistant even after a reinstall. I'm pretty sure the fix is in that config file that I don't know enough about. My suggestion would be to disable that if possible.

As far as the tile set goes; I'd still like to try to work on that, and I'll leave it up to your discretion as to weather or not you think it should be included in the package. I have made a little progress already.

Thank you for all of your work. It means more to me than the game that it has produced. This is the first time that I've actually felt like a participant in Free software, rather than just a user.

How well does the UI fit on the screen? That was my concern when looking at this.

An idea for right click: any click brings up a subwindow with options for what to do, kind of like what some sudoku implementations do. That to me seems like the least prone to accidents and is the most discoverable.

Maybe you can rotate the screen 180°, that way lefties can point with with left hand, and right clicking with the full screen button now located on the right bottom?

Epage, the small icons are very small, but usable. othersise it's almost perfect. If the navigation buttons were moved or put into a menu, the playing field and therefor the small icons could be bigger, but I wouldn't begin to presume that $20 covers a UI redesign. just making it fit the screen must have been a challenge.

Pokey: I'm glad you like it. I know about the fullscreening bug, and I was actually planning to remove that option, as it's useless on Maemo anyway. The right-click ability is currently just a quick hack to see if it works. (I've never actually even seen SDL code before, so this seemed the simplest way) As I said, changing resources (e.g. tilesets) is trivial, so feel free to give me a shout if you finish up a new set.
Right on - me too, actually, at least, to a higher degree.

Ed: the UI fits on the screen because I MADE it fit. It was all hardcoded. As for your idea, it would work, I think, but I'm not feeling like it right now. Maybe for the future.

Pokey: I'll ask for the money once I have the last few things worked out, but thanks. I'll PM you with my details now, however. I will probably spend a bit more time on this in the future, at least to maintain it, so I may change things like Ed's right-click idea later.

Cheers,